Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series: GTM Troubleshooting Checklist

By Rob Käll, CEO & Co-founder Cien.ai

The Wisdom of Munger

Most business people are familiar with Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway. And many of you may also revere his business partner and sidekick Charlie Munger, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 99 years and 11 months. Munger wrote an excellent book called “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” outlining his philosophy, and the methods used to generate Berkshire Hathaway’s fantastic investment returns. It comes down to three things: learn as much as possible, apply a multi-disciplinary approach (use all available models from all sciences), and do it checklist style. I.e., take a scientific approach to investing. As a RevOps or Growth practitioner you can apply the same checklist to client or PortCo GTM problems.

“One of the most common ways a fast-growing B2B company (especially one fueled by VC or PE funding) can fail and get into serious trouble is to have disappointing growth due to high rep ramping failure rates. ”
Rob Kall, CEO Cien.ai

The Scientific Approach

At the heart of the scientific approach is the hypothesis: “Perhaps this is what’s going on? Let’s examine the objective evidence to determine whether that hypothesis is confirmed or disproved.” I.e., it is no longer about your experience, your opinion, or your gut feel. It is just: “Do we have empirical observations that support the hypothesis or not?”

How to Apply the Scientific Method to Sales Problems

You can emulate Munger by a) taking a multi-disciplinary approach (i.e., not just looking at one thing such as sales calls, but also at marketing, customer support, and product usage) and b) testing multiple hypotheses checklist-style.

At Cien.ai we have defined 20+ hypotheses in 5 distinct growth categories which we test:

SAM & Segmentation – Size & quality of target accounts
Sales & Marketing Alignment – Settle disputes about lead quality & follow up
New Logo Selling – Clear all the hurdles to land a new customer
Existing Customers – Keep and expand customer relationships
Rep Performance – Ramp and coach more reps into A-Players

The key is to test all available hypotheses using the company’s own data, one at a time. We call this process a “Heatmap Analysis” because one of the outputs is a heatmap that visually shows the red areas of “pain”. This used to be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive, but with AI-based data cleaning and analysis, it is now possible to do in just a few business days.

What Does Success Look Like?

In most of the Growth Essentials Series articles, the definition of success is solving the specific GTM problem. The focus of this article, however, is finding the truth and discarding the “head-fakes”. A confirmed, well-defined, and measurable problem is much easier to address. And if you are a practitioner who needs to convince stakeholders to make an investment to solve the issue, being able to say you did it “Checklist Style” can bring credibility. And the extra benefit is that you’d know that Charlie would have been proud of you!

About the Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”.